Jung was a great believer in the direct connection between how a particular psychological theory developed and the particularity of the person (one's personal psychology).
Preamble (by David Russell)
The cold spring falls from the stone.
I passed and heard
The mountain, palm and fern
Spoken in one strange word.
The gum-tree stands by the spring.
I peeled its splitting bark
and found the written track
of a life I could not read.Judith Wright
Jung was a great believer in the direct connection between how a particular psychological theory developed and the particularity of the person (one's personal psychology). Likewise he saw the specificity of place, the location of its origin, as being a determinant of the 'personality' of the theory (its character and sense of direction) '... our way of looking at things is conditioned by what we are' (CW 4, p. 335).
As residents of these 'great southern lands', the psychology of our daily experience has been variably shaped by the prior experiences of having taken these lands essentially by force from Indigenous peoples, by having migrated from the other side of the world; and, not surprisingly, by the obsession with identity. So the questions of 'Who are we to call ourselves?' 'Where do we belong?' 'What is our story?' constitute the themes that preoccupy the media and the arts, and naturally enough, depth psychology.
Mainstream academic psychology has been very reluctant to enter the struggle for a language, and practice, that might address the matters of cultural psychology; in fact it has been slow to accept that such matters mattered at all. Yet this has always been a crucial element of the project that has come to be recognised as depth psychology. The articles in this collection from Australia and New Zealand are writings rich with imagery and metaphor, and they point to the mythic. The mythic, like god or the unconscious, is essentially unknowable.
Inevitably, I believe, the mythic will have more of a homely feel to it as it is increasingly fashioned by these lands and our confusing history of fear and longing that has gone to make up the meeting of the new world with the very ancient world. It is my view that the present authors are offering us a language that, while tentative and complex, is focused on the soft underbelly of our culture; its anxiety and other unspeakable aspects of our experience. None of the authors is telling us what to do or how things should be; there is no psychological St Peter, acting as if in possession of the key to unlock the unknowable. Rather, the language is thoughtful, the imagery is evocative: an orientation which is respectful of difference. The strength of this work is that it is not like the history of the past two hundred years, dominated by an ethos of control and denial. The discipline of academic psychology is slow to welcome this perspective but there is movement on the horizon and some significant, if tentative, recognition that the language being offered by depth psychology has a place. The acknowledgment of 'a place' allows for a mutually satisfying conversation to begin.
It has always fascinated me that while university psychology assiduously refused to entertain Jung, the average thinking person has been drawn to find out more. As measured by the number of books being published on Jungian subject matter and by the array of articles in weekend newspapers, Jung's relevance to the intelligent lay person has never been greater. Surely this must have something to do with Jung's deeply held belief that there was a psychological need to address any phenomenon, notwithstanding how complex or confusing it might be, 'on its own terms'. Following this Jungian tradition, this is precisely what the contributors to this collection have done. Each author has emphasised the primacy of experience ranging from the experience of primitive animal imagery and cultural catastrophe, to the failure to experience the body of the father and the voice of the mother, through to those experiences in which the physical and the psychological are undifferentiated, are experienced as one. Each contribution is an example of 'the careful and scrupulous observation' of what Jung liked to call the numinosum, that ... 'dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of the will' (CW 11, para. 6).
It is gratifying to see that the once rigid distinction, especially for science, between 'subject' and 'object' (between knowledge from the inside and knowledge from the outside) is slowly losing its usefulness. Academic psychology, so long having felt defensive as a science, is slow to let its defences down. Jung's desire to speak a psychological language, one not detached from daily experience, and one rich in imagery and mythic connections, is a wonderful legacy. I have been so excited by reading this volume and seeing how, with such a courageous orientation, this particular part of world is offering an increasingly homespun language of imagery and mythic experience so that the Jungian project, once shaped by the dramatic mountains and valleys of Germanic Switzerland, can be re-created anew. Of this conceptive project from Australia and New Zealand we can rightly be proud.
David Russell
Associate Professor, School of Psychology, University of Western Sydney
Foreword (by Andrew Samuels)
No matter how hard I tried to write the word 'Foreword', it kept coming out as 'Forward'. And that's the truth of it. These essays take analytical psychology (and hence psychoanalysis as well) forward because they stand as a response to the urgent need to remake this kind of work so that it can still be useful in a location far from its original home. So, to the perennial questions about analytical work that focus on what it is (science, art, craft) and who does it (names of the schools, labyrinthine training structures), these writers have decided to look at where they are.
Let's deal with the obvious problem right away. Amongst informed and politically aware thinkers in countries like Australia and New Zealand, there is a necessary caution about mindlessly continuing to use the categories and concepts of the hemisphere where one is not (Western, Northern). Analytical psychology can certainly be seen as a distorting import. Moreover, thoughtless Eurocentrism or wholesale acceptance of American ways is destructive, both on the literal level, politically and economically, and on the level of values, psychologically and spiritually.
But the fact that there are transplant problems doesn't mean that the enterprise should be abandoned and we should conclude that analytical psychology is simply not relevant in Australia because, torn out of its natural surroundings in Zurich, it simply won't work, even if there are plenty of patients willing to try it. I want to suggest a different way to look at this matter. My suggestion is that it remains possible to think and practice analytical psychology in Australia and New Zealand is because to do so is no more inauthentic or alienated than to do so in Europe or the United States.
Let me unpack this. I am saying that, world-wide, analytical psychology and psychoanalysis have started to lose touch with evolving cultural processes and what is important to people. World-wide, including in Europe and North America, what these disciplines have to say about society, ethnicity, relationships, sexuality, spirituality and what is needed for life to be good has become increasingly off the point, insufficiently challenging of the status quo and alienated from humanity and the planet. So this worry about analytical psychology as an import can be reframed by seeing it as ever more foreign even in the lands of its birth, the very places where it was manufactured and where it should not feel like an import.
There is this world-wide crisis in analytical psychology and psychoanalysis. Put in the baldest possible terms, the Jungian analysts working in Australia and New Zealand are no more off-beam or irrelevant than the Jungian analysts here in London. What stems from this observation? Well, as it seems to me reading this extraordinary collection, the analysts in Australia and New Zealand are doing a job that will benefit not only themselves and their patients but could be of immense help in revitalising the depth psychological scene in all countries, particularly in Europe and North America. These writers have worked on the problems that all analysts should be working on; it is anything but a provincial collection and I, for one, learned something new and important from each and every chapter.
One feature that distinguishes this book from other collections published by national groupings of Jungian analysts is that the range of references and attitudes on display in this book is far greater than is usually the case - it is actually quite staggering, ranging from Wagner, to Greek and other ancient myths, to numerous facets of the external and internal life of Indigenous peoples of Australia, to the particular psychological issues facing migrants, to clinical theorising. Uniting all of these is the sensibility to locale that I mentioned earlier. In many of the chapters this comes through in a concentration on land and landscape. In others, the emphasis is on current pressing social and political problems in the society to which the writers belong. In a number of chapters, the focus is more on the question of individual psychic survival when the inner landscape the subject is born to fails to reassure, and the old truths need replacing by ones that work 'on the ground' in this place and at this time. It is hard for me to convey in advance what this particular sensibility to place does to the reader. Having visited Australia several times, I found myself filled anew with images of the colours and scents of the place, evoked just by reading the papers.
Let us tackle another problem. Are these writers caught up in what the academics call 'Orientalism'? This means a sentimental, ahistorical idealisation of the 'Other' (Aboriginal ways, the desert, the migrant) which, when entered into more deeply, turns out to have a secret project of controlling such exotica, defining them in terms that the old powers have decreed in advance, and rendering them merely as quaint but ineffective features of Western-style city life, part of a kind of internal tourism, adorning the walls of the analysts' consulting rooms.
I do not want to give a benignly reassuring answer to this question of idealisation. This is because, if one stops trying for academic purity for a moment, one can see that some kind of love affair on the part of the writer was necessary for the production of papers of this calibre and shot through with this degree of passion. Let there be be some idealisation for the moment! There is plenty of time for mature reassessment and even for repenting at leisure. But, without that spontaneous gesture towards their material on the part of these Australian and New Zealand writers, there would be nothing which can be saluted with a 'forward'.
Andrew Samuels
Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex (UK)
Table of Contents
Preamble
David Russell
Foreword
Andrew Samuels
Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
Dale Dodd
Psyche and Environment
Anne Noonan
Coming to Terms with the Country
Craig San Roque
'Stream of Consciousness' and 'Ownership of Thought' in Indigenous Peoples
Leon Petchkovsky
Stories in the Making
Peter Fullerton
The Animating Body
Giles Clark
Volcanic Irruptions
Anne Brown
Some Ideas about the Father's Body
Heather Formaini
Jocasta's Lament
Glenda Cloughley
Hymn of the Pearl
Pamela D'Rozario
Dream Interpretation in an Informal Group Setting
Patrick Burnett
Thanatos and Erops in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde
Sally Kester
About the Authors
ANNE BROWN, MELBOURNE
Anne Brown trained and qualified as a Jungian analyst with the Society of Analytical Psychology, London. She is presently President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts. Anne Brown works in private practice in Melbourne with children, adolescents and adults. She is involved in the activities of the training institute of ANZSJA, particularly in Melbourne.
ANNE NOONAN, SYDNEY
Anne Noonan is an Australian psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, trained in Italy. She is a founding member of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts and a member of the Australian Association of Group Psychotherapy. She is interested in the relationships of politics, culture and image and in particular their explication in film. Anne Noonan has studied and written on the interconnectioons between Italian film and politics in the years 1943 to 1978.
PATRICK BURNETT, SYDNEY
Patrick Burnett completed his analytical training at the C G Jung Institute, Zurich, and is now in private practice in Sydney. He has been involved in and led dream groups; he has lectured on dreams in Australia and Europe. Patrick Burnett's other professional interests revolve around his continuing interest in dreams and the contemporary science of consciousness and its relationship to Jungian psychology. He is presently the President of the C G Jung Society of Sydney.
GILES CLARK, SYDNEY
Giles Clark has been in private practice since l975. He moved from London to Sydney in l995. He was Convenor and later the Coordinator of Training of the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists in London, and is now a senior analyst of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts. Giles Clark has lectured and taught at many analytic and psychotherapy trainings throughout the world. He is researching and writing on mind-body relations from both clinical and philosophical theoretical perspectives. 'The Animating Body', published in this collection, won the Michael Fordham Prize for the best paper relating to clinical issues published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology in l996.
GLENDA CLOUGHLEY, CANBERRA
Glenda Cloughley, BA, MSc (Hons) is a Jungian analyst, psychotherapist, singer and songwriter. She has a long-standing interest in the cultural relevance of Jungian thought, as reflected in her postgraduate studies in the fields of Social Ecology and Cultural Psychology. She is currently involved in PhD research. Previously Glenda Cloughley worked as a newspaper journalist in New Zealand and as a public affairs and management consultant for a wide range of public, private and community sector organisations in Australia.
DALE DODD, AUCKLAND
Dale Dodd, PhD, clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst, is in private analytic practice in Auckland, New Zealand and is past-president of the ANZSJA C G Jung Institute. His Buddhist practice is primarily in the Vajrayana tradition and he has a long-standing interest in Zen. He has a special interest in the dialogue between Buddhist and Western analytical psychologies.
HEATHER FORMAINI, SYDNEY
A member of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts, Heather Formaini works in private practice in Sydney. Formerly an award-winning broadcaster with the BBC and ABC, she is author of the best-selling book, Men: The Darker Continent and contributor to Sex and God. Heather Formaini is presently researching and writing on 'The Father's Body: The Problematic of Masculinity'.
PETER FULLERTON, MELBOURNE
Peter Fullerton is a member of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts, and works in private practice in Melbourne. He trained at the Society of Analytical Psychology (London) and at the Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies (London). He is a full member of the Society of Psychoanalytical Marital Psychotherapists (London).
SALLY KESTER, PERTH
Sally Kester is a training analyst in private practice. For many years she was a part-time lecturer in the University of Western Australia's School of Music, specialising in music of the Romantic era. She still lectures in the opera course. Her doctoral thesis was on Wagner's 'Ring' cycle. For ten years she wasa professional music critic.
LEON PETCHKOVSKY, GOLD COAST
Leon Petchkovsky, MBBS, DPM, FRCPsych, PhD, is a consultant psychiatrist, and director of the Gold Coast Integrated Mental Health Services Psychotherapy Programme. He is a clinical senior lecturer in psychiatry, University of Queensland, and a training analyst at the C G Jung Institute of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts.
PAM D'ROZARIO, PERTH
Pam D'Rozario is a Jungian analyst and clinical psychologist in private practice in Perth, Western Australia. Pam is married and has two adult sons. Having migrated twice and travelled widely from an early age, her interests include cross-cultural communication, migration and settlement, multi-culturalism and post-colonialism. Her earlier professional experience was in community and organisational psychology and these, together with psychoanalytic perspectives, have become growing interests.
CRAIG SAN ROQUE, SYDNEY
Craig San Roque was born in Australia. He worked in London for twenty years, specialising in child and family therapy. He trained with the Society of Analytical Psychology, London, and co-founded the Squiggle Foundation. Craig San Roque returned to Sydney in l986 and moved to Alice Springs in l992, with a focus on Indigenous matters, and intercultural dynamics. He also teaches at the University of Western Sydney, investigates cultural psychology, group process and the interface between therapy and theatre.
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